Books: Smooth But Not Velvet

THE SMALL HOURS OF THE NIGHT (232 pp.)—Timothy Angus Jones—Houghton Mifflin ($2.75).

Her name was Ekaterina and she was a real princess. Her husband, of course, was a real prince; his name was Nicolas. They lived at the Ritz in Paris with Ekaterina's father, an old expatriate king, and they had nothing to do but rock around all night in Montmartre nightclubs and drink buckets of champagne, because the old king still got about $3,000,000 a year from the old country. When Ekaterina and Nicolas took a shine to 20-year-old Barnaby Surrey, he thought it too wonderful to be true.

What a...